The easy sympathy which joy affords us, the shame we feel at allowing our poverty to disturb the sympathetic pleasures of others, has been enough to turn gullible individuals into an ethical herd, as slavishly dependent on the opinions of others as anything Mandeville and Rousseau had described. Worst of all, it was a theory of deference which explained how men became dependent on the unscrupulous as well as on the friends of justice. It was this to which he would return in 1790 in his last thoughts on the Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Even now, Smith was ready with more ammunition for the Rousseaunian. Why, he asked, did the citizens of a reasonably stable society think that it was particularly meritorious to obey the rules of justice? What were the origins of the belief that ‘we may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing’?20 The answer was all too simple. In stable societies most people regard those who violated life and property with such horror and abomination that they desist from committing flagrantly unjust acts out of fear of the social as well as the legal consequences. As he put it, ‘Every man is, no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own care; and as he is fitter to take care of himself than of any other person, it is fit and right that it should be so.’21 However, he has to learn that, ‘In the race for wealth, and honours, and preferments, he may run as hard as he can, and strain every nerve and every muscle, in order to outstrip all his competitors. But if he should justle, or throw down any of them, the indulgence of the spectators is entirely at an end. It is a violation of fair play, which they cannot admit of.’22 As we shall see, Smith was to admit in the second edition of his book that for most people vanity and shame, as well as fear, were probably enough to turn them into law-abiding citizens. But this did not explain the agonies of remorse that many feel when they have acted unjustly, or have even thought of doing so. Smith’s illustration of the retribution the ethically sensitive suffer is striking for its horror and psychological acuity. It underlines the violence that the civilizing process has clearly wrought on the personality of many citizens and is one of the most complex and subtle of the ‘illustrations’ Boswell and others admired so much in Smith’s lectures.
The violator of the more sacred laws of justice can never reflect on the sentiments which mankind must entertain with regard to him, without feeling all the agonies of shame, and horror, and consternation. When his passion is gratified, and he begins coolly to reflect on his past conduct, he can enter into none of the motives which influenced it. They appear now as detestable to him as they did always to other people. By sympathizing with the hatred and abhorrence which other men must entertain for him, he becomes in some measure the object of his own hatred and abhorrence. The situation of the person, who suffered by his injustice, now calls upon his pity. He is grieved at the thought of it; regrets the unhappy effects of his own conduct, and feels at the same time that they have rendered him the proper object of the resentment and indignation of mankind, and of what is the natural consequence of resentment, vengeance and punishment. The thought of this perpetually haunts him, and fills him with terror and amazement. He dares no longer look society in the face, but imagines himself as it were rejected, and thrown out from the affections of all mankind. He cannot hope for the consolation of sympathy in this his greatest and most dreadful distress. The remembrance of his crimes has shut out all fellow-feeling with him from the hearts of his fellow-creatures. The sentiments which they entertain with regard to him, are the very thing which he is most afraid of. Every thing seems hostile, and he would be glad to fly to some inhospitable desert, where he might never more behold the face of a human creature, nor read in the countenance of mankind the condemnation of his crimes. But solitude is still more dreadful than society. His own thoughts can present him with nothing but what is black, unfortunate, and disastrous, the melancholy forebodings of incomprehensible misery and ruin. The horror of solitude drives him back into society, and he comes again into the presence of mankind, astonished to appear before them, loaded with shame and distracted with fear, in order to supplicate some little protection from the countenance of those very judges, who he knows have already all unanimously condemned him. Such is the nature of that sentiment, which is properly called remorse; of all the sentiments which can enter the human breast the most dreadful.23
It was at this point that Smith was ready to turn the tables on Rousseau by showing that the moral sensibility of the ethically sensitive person had been shaped by some other agency than the opinions of others and in a way that could enhance rather than damage the moral personality. This person had learned the hard way that we cannot please all the people all the time, and was able to see himself as others saw him. He was able, in other words, to view his conduct through the eyes of an impartial spectator, an imaginary ‘man within the breast’, whose conversation and counsel and whose praise and blame had come to mean more to him than the judgements of friends and acquaintances. Sometimes the voice of this impartial spectator would be judgemental, and sound like the voice of conscience or even of the deity himself. Sometimes it would make it possible for us to think of his judgements as being right and even beautiful in themselves as well as being useful to society. And most gratifying of all to a person who had learned to live his life according to the direction of the impartial spectator, was the feeling that his conduct was right in his own eyes as well as in the eyes of others. As Smith was to put it in the last edition of the Theory in one of his most luminous phrases, ‘Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred.’24 In learning how to ‘humble the arrogance of [our] self-love, and bring it down to something which other men can go along with’, we have taken the first step on the road to a life of virtue.25 We have learned how to judge our own conduct and how to live independently of the opinions of others. The civilizing process will indeed make us unrecognizable to our former selves, but it will make us the persons we would like to be.
Smith’s theory is about the ethical power of the imagination. For what is this impartial spectator who has acquired the power of regulating the ethical behaviour of virtuously minded people, but a figment of the imagination, a fictional embodiment of a moral sensibility we have acquired in the course of ordinary life in order to soothe our moral anxieties and help us acquire the pleasing belief that we are ethically autonomous agents? We may like to believe that the voice of the impartial spectator is the eternal voice of conscience or of the deity, but in reality his voice is that of the world to which we belong. The ethical autonomy the impartial spectator offers us is a deception that has the function of rendering us more profoundly sociable than we were when we were in a state of ethical childhood and dependency. Rousseau once famously remarked that while men were born free, everywhere they were in chains. In Smith’s view the chains were those of the imagination, chains that could be loosened by a common-sense, sceptical awareness of the processes by which the moral personality was formed, but never altogether thrown off. And while Smith’s account of the life of virtue lived under the direction of the impartial spectator might seem to be nothing more than a subtle deception to a Rousseaunian or a Christian, and while this fabric of deception was to trouble him at the end of his life, Smith was to argue that the satisfaction of being able to live sociably under the direction of the impartial spectator was enough for humankind, and enough to encourage the improvement of society and the progress of civilization from the self-evidently wretched condition in which it had hitherto existed.
In the Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith offered a powerful conjecture about the nature of the civilizing process, about the ways in which ordinary human beings engaged in the business of ordinary life set out to satisfy their moral needs, and about the way in which some citizens acquire that sense of fitness and ethical beauty which makes it possible for them to aspire to
a life of virtue. He could now turn to other divisions of his science of man. In the conclusion to the Theory of Moral Sentiments he announced his intention to write a new book, which would ‘give an account of the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society, not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else is the object of law’.26 This was to be the task to which he was to turn in the later years of his academic career at Glasgow. The lectures on jurisprudence were revised, reorganized and furnished with new illustrations. The lectures on police, however, presented different problems. For although they were concerned with the regulation of commerce and were thus a branch of jurisprudence, Smith was becoming increasingly interested in opulence and the general principles on which the nature and progress of opulence depended – questions which belonged to the province of something that was becoming known as political economy. Indeed, it would become clear that until these principles were addressed, it would be impossible to write effectively about the sort of legislation that was appropriate to the regulation of commerce. It was a heavy load and not one which would sit easily with ever-increasing administrative burdens.
8
Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, 2. 1759–63
By the end of the summer vacation of 1758, the Theory of Moral Sentiments was virtually complete. It was published in late April 1759 in London by Andrew Millar, and shortly after in Edinburgh by Kincaid and Bell, publishers with whom Millar frequently worked. The printer was William Strahan, shortly to become a close friend of Smith and publisher of the Wealth of Nations. It was a well-produced, good-looking book which sold for what Millar described as ‘a Cheap 6s … especially considering the Matter which I am sure is excellent’, in a respectably sized edition of a thousand copies, two-thirds of which were destined for the London market, the rest for Edinburgh.1 Millar and Kincaid bought Smith’s copyright for an unknown but probably modest sum, on the assumption that the book would sell and that they would get their money back from subsequent editions. They were right, Millar ‘exalting and bragging’ that two-thirds of the London edition had sold before publication.2 It put Smith, who had a perfectionist’s love of tinkering, in the gratifying position of being able to plan a revised second edition almost as soon as the first was published. These good London sales were helped by the Scottish literary patronage machine. Hume and two fellow Select Society members, Alexander Wedderburn, the editor of the Edinburgh Review and the future Lord Chancellor Loughborough, and John Dalrymple, a good-natured country gentleman, man of letters and protégé of Montesquieu, arranged for copies to be sent to a carefully targeted list of London and London-Scots grandees, including the Earl of Bute, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Mansfield, the Earl of Shelburne and Charles Townshend, the stepfather to the Duke of Buccleuch. Indeed it was said that Townshend decided to offer Smith the job of tutoring his stepson on the strength of reading his book, an offer which came to nothing at the time but was renewed in 1763.
Publication of the Theory of Moral Sentiments proved to be an event that would allow its author to relaunch his career as a man of letters. It was an immediate literary success in London as well as in Scotland. John Home, David Hume’s cousin and one of Bute’s principal London advisers, told William Robertson ‘that it is in the hands of all persons of the best fashion; that it meets with great approbation both on account of the matter and stile; and that it is impossible for any book on so serious a subject to be received in a more gracious manner. It comforts the English a good deal to hear that you were bred at Oxford, they claim some part of you on that account.’3 Hume himself, then in London, turned the business of reporting a successful launch into a merciless tease.
Tho’ it has been publishd only a few Weeks, I think there appear already such strong Symptoms, that I can almost to venture to fortell its Fate. It is in short this— But I have been interrupted in my Letter by a foolish impertinent Visit of one who has lately come from Scotland [whose news Hume reports at length]. But to return to your Book, and its Success in this Town, I must tell you— A Plague of Interruptions! I orderd myself to be deny’d; and yet here is one that has broke in upon me again. He is a man of Letters, and we have had a good deal of literary Conversation. You told me, that you was curious of literary Anecdotes, and therefore I shall inform you of a few, that have come to my Knowledge. [And he does, in detail.] But what is all this to my Book? say you. — My Dear Mr Smith, have Patience: Compose yourself to Tranquillity: Show yourself a Philosopher in Practice as well as Profession: Think on the Emptiness, and Rashness, and Futility of the common Judgements of Men: How little they are regulatd by Reason in any Subject, much more in philosophical Subjects, which so far exceed the Comprehension of the Vulgar. Non si quid improba Roma, Elevet, accedas examenque improbum in illa, Perpendas trutina, nec te quaesiveris extra. A wise man’s Kingdom is his own Breast: Or, if he ever looks farther, it will only be to the Judgement of a select few, who are free from Prejudices, and capable of examining his Work. Nothing indeed can be a stronger Presumption of Falshood than the Approbation of the Multitude; and Phocion, you know, always suspected himself of some Blunder, when he was attended with the Applauses of the Poopulace.
Supposing, therefore, that you have duely prepard yourself for the worst by all these Reflections; I proceed to tell you the melancholy News, that your Book has been very unfortunate: For the Public seem disposd to applaud it extremely. It was lookd for by the foolish People with some Impatience; and the Mob of Literati are beginning already to be very loud in its Praises. Three Bishops calld yesterday at Millar’s Shop in order to buy Copies, and to ask Questions about the Author: The Bishop of Peterborough said he had passd the Evening in a Company, where he heard it extolld above all Books in the World. You may conclude what Opinion true Philosophers will entertain of it, when these Retainers to Superstition praise it so highly …4
And so on! Nearer home, Smith would have been equally gratified to learn that one of his former students, the Rev. James Wodrow, was writing enthusiastically to his friend Samuel Kenrick about a book of which he had more than a glimmering of understanding.
The whole of [its philosophy] stands upon the imagining substitution of ourselves in the place of others which seems to be the foundation of his Sympathy. It is however a most ingenious book. The Language is simple & beautiful; the Painting of the Passions & situations of men admirable. There is a wonderful profusion of Examples to illustrate the different parts of the Theory which seem like so many facts and experiments in Natural Philosophy & seem to confirm & support the Author’s principles in the most satisfying manner & I am perswaded these Examples will carry three fourths of the Readers along with them & make them embrace the Principles without further enquiry. To say no more his Morals seem to be pure. The Author seems to have a strong detestation of vice and Love of Virtue & perhaps a regard for Religion at least it does not appear to me that the book has any licentious tendency like the most part of David Hume’s writing on those subjects tho perhaps the Principles are at the bottom the same. The Book itself I imagine will go down to Posterity as a fine Composition whatever becomes of the Theory it was intended to introduce & support.5
However, in the manse of Stichel, on the Borders, the Rev. George Ridpath, another of Hume’s friends, struck a more critical note. ‘I can by no means join in the applauses I have heard bestowed on it.’ No doubt the theory was new, but the treatment was diffuse, imprecise and marred by an ‘extravagant turn to declaim and embellish’ and said in four hundred pages what could have been summarized in twenty.6 In other words, it was an over-illustrated style of philosophizing of which the minister did not approve.
Smith had interesting early reviewers: Edmund Burke in the Annual Register for 1759, and an author who was probably Hume himself in the Critical Review of May 1759.7 Both welcomed the book as an original and accessible contribution to the theory of morals. Burke thoug
ht it offered ‘a new and at the same time, a perfectly natural road of speculation’ about the principles of sympathy and moral approbation, and that it had yielded up ‘one of the most beautiful fabrics of moral theory, that has perhaps ever appeared’. Its ‘illustrations’ were those that only ‘a man of uncommon observation’ could have supplied.8 In fact, Burke had already written to Smith to introduce himself and to thank him for having sent a copy of the book; it was the start of a long friendship. Burke understood what Smith was up to very well. ‘[T]hose easy and happy illustrations from common Life and manners in which your work abounds more than any other that I know by far’, he wrote,
are indeed the fittest to explain those natural movements of the mind with which every Science relating to our Nature ought to begin. But one sees, that nothing is less used, than what lies directly in our way. Philosophers therefore very frequently miss a thousand things that might be of infinite advantage, though the rude Swain treads daily on them with his clouted Shoon [shoes]. It seems to require that infantine simplicity which despises nothing, to make a good Philosopher, as well as to make a good Christian.
To be sure, Smith’s generous use of illustrations had made his discussion ‘rather a little too diffuse. This is however a fault of the generous kind, and infinitely preferable to the dry sterile manner, which those of dull imaginations are apt to fall into.’9 For as Burke had correctly noted, it was Smith’s illustrations that gave force and credibility to his speculations about the workings of sympathy.
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